78 Life of a Fossil Hunter 



in the roof and floor of the mouth like bricks in a 

 pavement, forming a sort of mill which ground up 

 the shells upon which the creature subsisted. A 

 strange thing about these teeth was that one side 

 of the enamel was white and the other black. Cope 

 called the species Myledaphus bipartitus (Fig. I3&). 



The diamond-shaped enameled scales of the Lepi- 

 dotus, an ancient relative of the gar-pike, were very 

 common, as were also the teeth of several species 

 of dinosaurs besides those already mentioned. 



To-day the great museums of the country have 

 complete or nearly complete skeletons of these crea- 

 tures, the largest land animals that ever inhabited 

 the earth. The splendid specimen of Brontosaurns 

 (Fig. 16) in the American Museum at New York 

 is over sixty feet long. Nothing so fires the imagi- 

 nation as a visit to the halls where these ancient 

 lizards now stand. 



I am delighted that recent authorities, Drs. 

 Osborn and Lambe, have given Professor Cope 

 credit for these discoveries of his in 1876, discov- 

 eries which are made the more memorable by the 

 fact that he was the first scientist who had the fore- 

 sight and the courage to explore these fossil beds 

 after Dr. Hayden, their original discoverer, was 

 driven out of the region by Blackfeet Indians. 

 Indeed, the chief purpose of this chapter is to put 

 forward the claim that Professor Cope, Mr. Isaac, 





